CategoriesStyles and Movements
The Pictures Generation
American artists of the late 1970s and 1980s who reworked images from advertising, film and television to expose how pictures shape identity.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
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About
Artists raised on television, magazines and movies came of age in the 1970s asking what originality could mean amid so many pictures. Several had studied at the California Institute of the Arts under John Baldessari before moving to New York. They reworked mass-media material by rephotographing, cropping, restaging and captioning, making the conventions of advertising and cinema visible.
Cindy Sherman cast herself as anonymous heroines in Untitled Film Stills (1977–80), none drawn from a real film. Sherrie Levine rephotographed reproductions of Walker Evans's Depression-era pictures in After Walker Evans (1981), and Richard Prince rephotographed cigarette advertisements with their text cropped away. Barbara Kruger laid short slogans over found photographs, Robert Longo drew city figures in contorted poses, and Louise Lawler photographs artworks in the rooms where they hang. The name comes from a 2009 survey at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which borrowed it from Douglas Crimp's exhibition Pictures (1977).
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